Alasdair Watson

Topic #3 from Hester: Women. This one gave me some trouble, for a number of reasons, but if I keep re-writing this, I’m going to go mad. I’ll just have to ask you to be kind to my flaws, here.

I toyed with idea of writing some ghastly piece of misogynistic trash, and calling it humour. I toyed with the idea of digging around in some area of art, and waffling for a while about the changing depiction of women in, I dunno, 15th century Prussian literature, or something. I thought about talking about some remarkable historic or mythic female figures. I considered the idea of writing a parody of some Romantic poet or other.

And of course, the reason for this is the fear that if I actually talked seriously about the other gender, I might either say something stupid, offensive, or worse still, inadvertently revealing, and it would be out there on there internet for ever and ever and then no-one would ever want to sleep with me again.

Which is a load of rubbish. Frankly, I’ve already said so many stupid, offensive and revealing things on the internet that I will have to reincarnate several times before anyone wants to sleep with me again.^[1]

So, women. As an heterosexual male, I am pretty unconditionally in favour of women. I’m not the sort to wax poetic in the manner of a bad sonnet, offering up paeans to the female form, or to the pleasure of their company, but if I must have other people cluttering the planet up, getting underfoot and stopping me from doing whatever I damn well please (and apparently I must) then I’m glad there are women around. This is traditionally the point in the joke where there is some remark about how women smell nicer than men, or some similarly condescending rubbish, but some time around a few years ago we invented metrosexuality, and then Moulton Brown turned up, the end result being that I know some delightful smelling men as well.

And having skirted the faintly sexist joke, I think we’ll skip past the slightly patronising bit where I wax lyrical about how generally awesome the women I know are. I mean, it goes without saying that they all are, and if any of them are in need of an ego boost, they only have to leave a comment asking me to list a few of the ways I think they’re awesome, and I’ll gladly do so. But for the purposes of this whatever-this-is, we’ll take it as read that the women I know are at the very least least as awesome as the men I know.

So where does that leave me? Well, I could talking about gender equality and equal rights, and the role of women in society, but while I’m not that clever, I am clever enough to know a can of worms when I see it. So we’ll leave it as this: I absolutely believe in gender equality, in more or less the same way I believe in, say, breathing. I am aware that I am privileged just by being born male (among other things) and think that it is outrageous that not everyone enjoys the same privileges that I do (and I am disgusted that in this context “privilege” can mean anything starting from basic things like “walk down the street in security in safety”). I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it, or doing anything about that, though. I feel faintly bad about that, when it occurs to me to do so, but apparently not enough to change my behaviour. Hurrah for being a white middle class male, and having the world laid out on a plate for me.

So that kind of leaves relationships, which is sort of an excuse to talk about me, rather then women, but well I think the last year has actually taught me something about the way I relate to women, at least in a relationship context, and I probably ought to set it down at some point, just because nothing reinforces lessons like writing about them.

I’m aware that I’m approaching the end of my Year Of Saying No. (When Ewa left last year, I decided to be single for at least a year. And I’m not someone who really enjoys casual sex, so this amount to a Year Of Saying No. Not that I have been called on to say no more than about twice.) It’s been interesting. And this is where we get into stuff that might make me sound a little ghastly, so please, bear with me.

I assume that I am not unusual in that if I am single, and I meet someone who ticks all the basic checkboxes of: is mentally interesting, physically my “type”, and is, at least as far as I know single and willing to sleep with my gender, and there is some sort of chemistry between us, I might at some point least entertain the possibility of a relationship with them. The process by which most human relationships start is when one person says to another “I would like to find out if we could be more than friends” either in the traditional manner, by copping off with them while drunk, or by bucking all convention and actually asking them out.

But because (once or twice this year) I’ve found myself actively thinking “hmmmm….” about another person and then deliberately thinking “not allowed/year off/also don’t be stupid”, which has in turn made me think about exactly what compromises I would be willing to make in my life for the right person. Because in theory, if I’m having the “hmmm…” moment – and obviously, my desire alone is obviously no guarantee of success, but equally obviously my lack of action is a guarantee of failure – then surely stopping myself is the act of an idiot. I’m sure there are a few people reading this who would think so, judging by the few conversations I’ve had around this topic over the year.

But here’s the thing: I am, politely, Bad At Relationships. I’m bad at getting into them, requiring to basically be hit around the head before I notice anyone else’s interest in me, and while (I think) I’m a pretty reasonable boyfriend for a while, when things are new and exciting and the oxytocin is flowing freely, after some ill-defined time period of between 8 and 18 months, I start to want to spend more time on my interests and hobbies, which are so nerdy as to put all previously-encountered women right off. (I can’t blame them.) I’m sure this isn’t *that* unusual, but judging from prior history I seem to take it to extremes. It’s not that I’m any less interested in the other person, but I have a reasonable collection of hobbies and interests, and after a while, I naturally want to sort out how I balance the various bits of my life. I just seem to have a regrettable tendency to do this badly.

So starting from a basis of “even contemplating beginning a relationship is compromising a goal I have set myself”, has caused me to think about relationships in a different light. I don’t know if it’s made me likely to be better or worse at them. I think it’s likely to have made me more organised at them – I think in the future, I’d be more disciplined about the amount of space I made for someone in my life, and I think I’d make more effort to ensure that having made the space for another person in my life, I didn’t let my hobbies encroach back on it. I think I’d be a lot clearer (with myself as much as anyone else) about the things that I will and will not put on hold for the sake of a relationship and thus perhaps avoid that gearshift later in the relationship, or at least make it less jarring.

Which, by the sound of it, rather think mirrors the experience of some of my friends who are investigating polyamory as a lifestyle choice, who in juggling multiple partners, are having to be clear about who gets what space in their lives. It’s just that while they are warm and caring people with a lot of love to give, I am a solitary prick who values having a lot of time to arse around on a computer engaging in whatever my pet obsession is at a the moment, and can barely tolerate other people impinging on it at the best of times.

Were I a different chap, this might bother me. But generally, being left alone to get on with whatever I damn well please works for me.

Except for those cold, cold nights, around 2am, lying alone in bed, crying silently in the dark.^[2]

^[1] Put the violins down. I do not actually believe this.

^[2] Don’t be so fucking ridiculous.

Second topic as part of this here meme thing.

I’m tattooed. As time goes on, I will almost certainly become more so. At some point, I may get pierced, but that’s a vague maybe – I think I’d be doing it as much just to do as anything else. Which isn’t to say that’s a bad reason, but more ink at some point is pretty much a certainty, and the ink will have meaning beyond “I just felt like doing this”. Regardless, I am pretty unconditionally in favour of body modification. We inhabit lovely bags of mostly water for our three score and ten, and we have the technology to change them. Why shouldn’t we? They’re ours. They’re the one thing we absolutely, unquestionably, and completely own. Body modification is an expression of that basic right: self-governance.

It amazes me that there’s even a debate about it, that there are still social preconceptions attached to it. (I know they’re diminishing all the time, but still: my otherwise marvellous Dad sighs and shakes his head whenever the subject of my ink comes up, and he’s not the only one.) To me it’s this simple: do you wear clothes? Then you are modifying the appearance of your body. Piercings and Ink are just fixed expressions of the same thing. Sure, I can’t (currently) easily change what’s inked on to me. Which is why I’m careful about what I’ve got on me – it’s stuff that I am confident that even if my relationship with the symbols themselves changes, the things they symbolise will remain important to me.

My friend Del also talks about ink, scarification etc being an act of reclamation. I can relate. I’ve never been very fond of my body. I’m not dysmorphic, or anything, but still: I’ve never really liked the way I look, even back when I was young and thin. I mean, I don’t exactly hate my appearance, it’s more for a long time my body was always been kind of irrelevant to me. Putting ink in some places is a way of altering my relationship with my flesh, changing it from merely something that carries my conciousness around, to being something I inhabit, encoding it with something that means something to me in a way that my undecorated flesh does not. And in writing this, it’s just occurred to me that there’s a pretty direct temporal link between my getting (more) ink, and my doing (more) exercise.

So. Yeah. Ink. It’s ace. And it is good for you.

As part of one of them there internet memes, my friend Hester suggested I talk about (among other things) “The Music That Changed Your Life”. So here goes.

There really is nothing like the electric thrill of new music, is there? “The full-head tingle” to steal a marvellous phrase from a man I never met. I’m just going to ramble at length here, and see where I wind up.

The first pop song I remember being a fan of was this one.

Shakin’ Stevens “This Ole House”. I’d just turned 4, and if memory serves, the first time I heard it was when it got played at my birthday party. I loved it. Either way, it turned me into a Shakin’ Stevens fan for about the next 5 years. My parents must have been pig sick of the fact that I basically listened to the same two Shaky albums, a Boney M greatest hits album, and Now That’s What I Call Music volume 3, and not a lot else, in steady rotation between the ages of 4 and 10.

And then for my 11th birthday, presumably in a bid to confine my repetitive music listening habits to my bedroom, they bought me a “ghetto blaster”. Or at least a tape and radio cassette deck. And so naturally, I started to do my part to kill music, by taping songs off the radio. I still vaguely remember the track list of the first album I taped off the radio, in that heady fortnight after acquiring my new music playing device. This was the first track on it, and, as I recall, eventually featured a further three times in that 90 minutes of music.

Yeah. I was 11.

Let’s skip through my teenage years a bit. There was a fair amount of Pet Shop Boys and U2.

And then, in November of 1991, Freddie Mercury died. This isn’t terribly relevant, although I did buy the two Best of Queen CDs that got released to capitalise on his death at some point in early ‘92. What was relevant is it meant that this song was not Christmas number one, like it should have been.

Ah, the KLF. It’d be hard to overstate the impact that they, and particularly Bill Drummond have had on my thinking over the years. Drummond’s love of, and relationship to, Art, his willingness to consider it a very very broad church indeed, his willingness to look for merit in things other would dismiss and his attempts to involve others in art have definitely influenced my own views. And plus, there’s a pretty direct line from this track to The Alabama 3, who last.fm inform me are my third-most-listened-to act.

Spin on again to the summer of 1994. 17 years old. My friend Lydia’s parents went away for the three or four weeks during the school holidays, and for those few weeks, there was a crowd of us who would pop round in the afternoons and evenings, whenever we had nothing else to do, indulging in those teenager pastimes of strong cider and cheap weed. And, obviously, there was music. A lot of Levellers and PWEI and similar crusty type stuff that I’m still very fond of. And I was sitting there in her back garden as the sun went down, slightly buzzed, and someone put this song on.

“The full-head tingle.” I cannot explain it other than to say that I love this band with a pure, holy, teenage love that has never yet wavered. This track, “Eye Of The Average” throws me back to the sheer bloody magic of summer nights with friends in that period of your youth when you are definitely going to be different and special, and definitely going to set the world on it’s ear.

And we’ll spin on again. University. NIN, Tori Amos, Sisters of Mercy, Dead Can Dance, sundry predictable goth stuff. I’m still listening to them.

Age 21, though, I picked up a few albums that I have been listening to in heavy rotation for the last ten years. All of them gave that visceral response that I really hadn’t had since I was 17.

The first is by Alan Moore – “The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels”. If I could play you the opening track, “The Hair of The Snake That Bit Me”, I would. But it isn’t on YouTube, or myspace. So instead, if you pop along here, you can listen to Alan Moore talking about Art, from one of his later CDs.

The second is Nick Cave’s “Murder Ballads”.

I’ll skip going on about Cave. You’re probably all familiar with his work. He’s one of my favourite songwriters. I worked back from Murder Ballads to his earlier, more challenging stuff. I love it all.

And the third was Tom Waits, “Mule Variations”. This song, “Come On Up To The House” burned itself into my brain the very first time I heard it. More than any other artist, he’s got a staggering hit rate for doing that to me. In fact, here’s a more recent one that had exactly the same effect, just because.

As writers, all three of them are lodged in my head in different ways, and I have a very hard time articulating how and why. Let’s just say I can find wisdom of a sort in each of their work, a connection to a broader mythology born of the everyday. Wow, that sounds pretentious, even by my standards. Look, I could talk for hours about each of them, and I’m conscious that this is approaching a thousands words already, and there are other bands I want to mention. Just leave it at the fact that those three have a massive impact on my tastes and my thinking.

But y’know, this is meant to be “music that changed my life”. I think there’s a case to be made for most of the above. But the others? Well, I am a huge fan of The Alabama 3, The Dresden Dolls, Jason Webley, Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, The Fall, Firewater, Flipron, Flogging Molly, Miles Davis and countless others. And like any art I enjoy, of course they’ve changed my thinking. But I think it’s the ones above that reflect a growing love of music through my youth, and really reflect music that changed the way I think about the world, and explain most about the music I allow to change my life these days.

Still, I’m looking forward to the next time I encounter a new band that gives me that feeling….